Zeus : a study in ancient religion - Warburg Institute

Development in the meaning of Olympos 115
By the fourth, and even by the fifth, century
before our era the
word Olympos had acquired a further significance. It meant no
longer the mere mountain, but the 'sky' above it. Thus Sophokles
in his Antigone makes Kreon, when at Thebes, swear '
by yon
Olympos 1
,' and Euripides in his Andromeda makes the heroine
apostrophise Night as follows :
O holy Night,
How long the course thou drivest,
Charioting the starry ridges
Of holy ailher
Through dread Olympos 2 .
Both poets contrast Olympos in the sense of 'sky' with 'earth 3 .'
The same usage is found in prose. The author of the Platonic
Epinomis speaks
of the visible heaven as '
or sky, whichever you choose to call it 4
,'
the kdsmos or Olympos
while the author of the
Aristotelian treatise On the Universe declares that God '
being pure
has his station above in a pure place, even that which we truly
name ouranos, since it is the "
boundary" (/toros) of things "above"
(dno), and Olympos as "
wholly-shining "
(Jiolo-lampes) and separate
from all such darkness and disorderly movement as arises among
us by means of storm and stress of winds 5 .'
The change in meaning from Olympos the
'
mountain '
to
'
Olympos the sky '
mountain rose into
would readily follow from the belief that the
the aither. And for the prevalence of this
belief there is abundant evidence 6 . It is even probable that in
ancient days the inhabitants of the district actually spoke of the
Oiipavov, Moipa for 'M.olpa. N. G. Polites MeX^r?; eiri rov filov twv 'Neuripuv 'EW-qvuv
Athens 1874 ii. 228 gives k' i] for ical i). J. C. Lawson Modern Greek Folklore and
Ancient Greek Religion Cambridge 1910 p. 128 prints the third line as Sirov 17 Moipais twv
MoipCov. He justly draws attention to the ancient word K6pv(i(iov , citing variants with
K6\vpif$oi> (a dialect form, or else a corruption due to assonance with "OXv/jlttov) and
Kbpoifiov (for which he proposes Kbpvfiov). The word Kopv/mfJos is akin to Kopv